Whispering Smith

“Good-night, Marion. Some one is at the cottage door.”

“It is probably Mr. McCloud and Dicksie. I will let them in.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

WICKWIRE

McCloud and Dicksie met them at the porch door. Marion, unnerved, went directly to her room. Whispering Smith stopped to speak to Dicksie and McCloud interposed. “Bob Scott telephoned the office just now he had a man from Oroville who wanted to see you right away, Gordon,” said he. “I told him to send him over here. It is Wickwire.”

“Wickwire,” repeated Whispering Smith. “Wickwire has no business here that I know of; no doubt it is something I ought to know of. And, by the way, you ought to see this man,” he said, turning again to Dicksie. “If McCloud tells the story right, Wickwire is a sort of protégé of yours, Miss Dicksie, though neither of you seems to have known it. He is the tramp cowboy who was smashed up in the wreck at Smoky Creek. He is not a bad man, but whiskey, you know, beats some decent men.” A footstep fell on the porch. “There he comes now, I reckon. Shall I let him in a minute?”

“Oh, I should like to see him! He has been at the ranch at different times, you know.”

Smith opened the door and stepping out on the porch, talked with the new-comer. In a moment he brought him in. Dicksie had seated herself on the sofa, McCloud stood in the doorway of the dining-room, and Whispering Smith laid one arm on the table as he sat down beside it with his face above the dark shade of the lamp. Before him stood Wickwire. The half-light threw him up tall and dark, but it showed the heavy shock of black hair falling over his forehead, and the broad, thin face of a mountain man.

“He has just been telling me that Seagrue is loose,” Whispering Smith explained pleasantly. “Who turned the trick, Wickwire?”

“Sheriff Coon and a deputy jailer started with Seagrue for Medicine Bend this morning. Coming through Horse Eye Canyon, Murray Sinclair and Barney Rebstock got a clean drop on them, took Seagrue, and they all rode off together. They didn’t make any bones about it, either. Their gang has got lots of friends over there, you know. They rode into Atlantic City and stayed over an hour. Coon tracked them there and got up a posse of six men. The three were standing in front of the bank when the sheriff rode into town. Sinclair and Seagrue got on their horses and started off. Rebstock went back to get another drink. When he came out of the saloon he gave the posse a gun-fight all by himself, and wounded two men and made his get-away.”

Whispering Smith shook his head, and his hand fell on the table with a tired laugh. “Barney Rebstock,” he murmured, “of all men! Coward, skate, filler-in! Barney Rebstock–stale-beer man, sneak, barn-yard thief! Hit two men!” He turned to McCloud. “What kind of a wizard is Murray Sinclair? What sort of red-blood toxin does he throw into his gang to draw out a spirit like that? Murray Sinclair belongs to the race of empire-builders. By Heaven, it is pitiful a man like that should be out of a job! England, McCloud, needs him. And here he is holding up trains on the mountain division!”

“They are all up at Oroville with the Williams Cache gang, celebrating,” continued Wickwire.

Whispering Smith looked at the cowboy. “Wickwire, you made a good ride and I thank you. You are all right. This is the young lady and this is the man who had you sent to the hospital from Smoky Creek,” he added, rising. “You can thank them for picking you up. When you leave here tell Bob Scott to meet me at the Wickiup with the horses at eleven o’clock, will you?” He turned to Dicksie in a gentle aside. “I am riding north to-night–I wish you were going part way.”

Dicksie looked at him intently. “You are worried over something,” she murmured; “I can see it in your face.”

“Nothing more than usual. I thrive, you know, on trouble–and I’m sorry to say good-night so early, but I have a long ride ahead.” He stepped quietly past McCloud and out of the door.

Wickwire was thanking Dicksie when unwillingly she let Whispering Smith’s hand slip out of her own. “I shore wouldn’t have been here to-night if you two hadn’t picked me up,” laughed Wickwire, speaking softly to Dicksie when she turned to him. “I’ve knowed my friends a long time, but I reckon they all didn’t know me.”

“I’ve known you longer than you think,” returned Dicksie with a smile. “I’ve seen you at the ranch-house. But now that we really do know each other, please remember you are always sure of a home at the ranch–whenever you want one, Mr. Wickwire, and just as long as you want one. We never forget our friends on the Crawling Stone.”

“If I may make so bold, I thank you kindly. And if you all will let me run away now, I want to catch Mr. Whispering Smith for just one minute.”

Wickwire overtook Smith in Fort Street. “Talk quick, Wickwire,” he said; “I’m in a hurry. What do you want?”

“Partner, I’ve always played fair with you.”

“So far as I know, Wickwire, yes. Why?”

“I’ve got a favor to ask.”

“What is it–money?”

“No, partner, not money this time. You’ve always been more than liberal with me. But so far I’ve had to keep under cover; you asked me to. I want to ask the privilege now of coming out into the open. The jig is up so far as watching anybody goes.”

“Yes.”

“There’s nobody to watch any more–they’re all to chase, I reckon, now. The open is my kind of a fight, anyway. I want to ride out this manhunt with you.”

“How is your arm?”

“My arm is all right, and there ought to be a place for me in the chase now that Ed Banks is out of it. I want to cut loose up on the range, anyhow; if I’m a man I want to know it, and if I ain’t I want to know it. I want to ride with you after Seagrue and Sinclair and Barney Rebstock.”

Whispering Smith spoke coldly: “You mean, Wickwire, you want to get killed.”

“Why, partner, if it’s coming to me, I don’t mind–yes.”

“What’s the use, Wickwire?”

“If I’m a man I want to know it; if I ain’t, it’s time my friends knowed it. Anyhow, I’m man enough to work out with some of that gang. Most of them have put it over me one time or another; Sinclair pasted me like a blackbird only the other day. They all say I’m nothing but a damned tramp. You say I have done you service–give me a show.”

Whispering Smith stopped a minute in the shadow of a tree and looked keenly at him. “I’m too busy to-night to say much, Wickwire,” he said after a moment. “You go over to the barn and report to Bob Scott. If you want to take the chances, it is up to you; and if Bob Scott is agreeable, I’ll use you where I can–that’s all I can promise. You will probably have more than one chance to get killed.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

INTO THE NORTH

The moon had not yet risen, and in the darkness of Boney Street Smith walked slowly toward his room. The answer to his question had come. The rescue of Seagrue made it clear that Sinclair would not leave the country. He well knew that Sinclair cared no more for Seagrue than for a prairie-dog. It was only that he felt strong enough, with his friends and sympathizers, to defy the railroad force and Whispering Smith, and planned now, probably, to kill off his pursuers or wear them out. There was a second incentive for remaining: nearly all the Tower W money had been hidden at Rebstock’s cabin by Du Sang. That Kennedy had already got hold of it Sinclair could not know, but it was certain that he would not leave the country without an effort to recover the booty from Rebstock.

Whispering Smith turned the key in the door of his room as he revolved the situation in his mind. Within, the dark was cheerless, but he made no effort to light a lamp. Groping his way to the side of the low bed, he sat down and put his head between his hands to think.

There was no help for it that he could see: he must meet Sinclair. The situation he had dreaded most, from the moment Bucks asked him to come back to the mountains, had come.

He thought of every phase of the outcome. If Sinclair should kill him the difficulties were less. It would be unpleasant, certainly, but something that might happen any time and at any man’s hands. He had cut into the game too long ago and with his eyes too wide open to complain at this time of the possibility of an accident. They might kill each other; but if, escaping himself, he should kill Sinclair–

He came back in the silence always to that if. It rose dark between him and the woman he loved–whom he had loved since she was a child with school-girl eyes and braided hair. After he had lost her, only to find years afterward that she was hardly less wretched in her life than he in his, he had dreamed of the day when she might again be free and he free to win a love long hoped for.

But to slay this man–her husband–in his inmost heart he felt it would mean the raising of a bar as impalpable as fate, and as undying, to all his dreams. Deserved or not, whatever she should say or not say, what would she feel? How could her husband’s death in that encounter, if it ever came, be other than a stain that must shock and wound her, no matter how much she should try not to see. Could either of them ever quite forget it?

Kennedy and his men were guarding the Cache. Could they be sent against Sinclair? That would be only a baser sort of murder–the murder of his friends. He himself was leader, and so looked upon; the post of danger was his.

He raised his head. Through the window came a faint light. The moon was rising, and against the inner wall of the room the straight, hard lines of the old wardrobe rose dimly. The rifles were within. He must choose.

He walked to the window and pushed the curtain aside. It was dark everywhere across the upper town, but in the distance one light burned. It was in Marion’s cottage. He had chosen this room because from the window he could see her home. He stood for a few moments with his hands in his pockets, looking. When he turned away he drew the shade closely, lighted a lamp, and unlocked the wardrobe door.

Scott left the barn at half-past ten with a led horse for Whispering Smith. He rode past Smith’s room in Fort Street, but the room was dark, and he jogged down to the Wickiup square, where he had been told to meet him. After waiting and riding about for an hour, he tied the horses and went up to McCloud’s office. McCloud was at his desk, but knew nothing of Whispering Smith except that he was to come in before he started. “He’s a punctual man,” murmured Bob Scott, who had the low voice of the Indian. “Usually he is ahead of time.”

“Is he in his room, do you think?” asked McCloud.

“I rode around that way about fifteen minutes ago; there was no light.”

“He must be there,” declared McCloud. “Have you the horses below? We will ride over and try the room again.”

Fort Street back of Front is so quiet after eleven o’clock at night that a footfall echoes in it. McCloud dismounted in front of the bank building and, throwing the reins to Bob Scott, walked upstairs and back toward Smith’s room. In the hallway he paused. He heard faint strains of music. They came from within the room–fragments of old airs played on a violin, and subdued by a mute, in the darkness. Instinct stayed McCloud’s hand at the door. He stood until the music ceased and footsteps moved about in the room; then he knocked, and a light appeared within. Whispering Smith opened the door. He stood in his trousers and shirt, with his cartridge-belt in his hand. “Come in, George. I’m just getting hooked up.”

“Which way are you going to-night, Gordon?” asked McCloud, sitting down on the chair.

“I am going to Oroville. The crowd is celebrating there. It is a défi, you know.”

“Who are you going to take with you?”

“Nobody.”

McCloud moved uneasily. “I don’t like that.”

“There will be nothing doing. Sinclair may be gone by the time I arrive, but I want to see Bob and Gene Johnson, and scare the Williams Cache coyotes, just to keep their tails between their legs.”

“I’d like to kill off half a dozen of that gang.”

Whispering Smith said nothing for a moment. “Did you ever have to kill a man, George?” he asked buckling his cartridge-belt.

“No. Why?”

There was no reply. Smith had taken a rifle from the rack and was examining the firing mechanism. He worked the lever for a moment with lightning-like speed, laid the gun on the bed, and sat down beside it.

“You would hardly believe, George, how I hate to go after Murray Sinclair. I’ve known him all my life. His folks and mine lived across the street from one another for twenty years. Which is the older? Murray is five years older than I am; he was always a big, strong, good-looking fellow.” Whispering Smith put his hands on the side of the bed. “It is curious how you remember things that happened when you were a boy, isn’t it? I thought of something to-night I hadn’t thought of for twenty years. A little circus came to town. While they were setting up the tent the lines for the gasolene tank got fouled in the block at the top of the centre pole. The head canvasman offered a quarter to any boy that would climb the pole and free the block. One boy after another tried it, but they couldn’t climb half-way up. Then Murray sailed in. I was seven years old and Murray was twelve, and he wore a vest. He gave me the vest to hold while he went up. I felt like a king. There was a lead-pencil in one pocket, beautifully sharpened, and I showed it to the other boys. Did he make good? He always made good,” said Whispering Smith gloomily. “The canvasman gave him the quarter and two tickets, and he gave one of the tickets to me. I got to thinking about that to-night. As boys, Murray and I never had a quarrel.” He stopped. McCloud said nothing, and, after an interval, Smith spoke again:

“He was an oracle for all the small boys in town, and could advise us on any subject on earth–whether he knew anything about it or nothing about it made no difference. I told him once I wanted to be a California stage-robber, and he replied without an instant’s hesitation that I ought to begin to practise running. I was so upset at his grasp of the subject that I hadn’t the nerve to ask him why I needed to practise running to be a stage-robber. I was ashamed of appearing green and to this day I’ve never understood what he meant. Whether it was to run after the stage or to run away from it I couldn’t figure out. Perhaps my being too proud to ask the question changed my career. He went away for a long time, and we heard he was in the Black Hills. When he came back, my God! what a hero he was.”

Bob Scott knocked at the door and Whispering Smith opened it. “Tired of waiting, Bob? Well, I guess I’m ready. Is the moon up? This is the rifle I’m going to take, Bob. Did Wickwire have a talk with you? He’s all right. Suppose you send him to the mouth of Little Crawling Stone to watch things a day or two. They may try to work north that way or hide in the wash.”

Walking down to the street, Whispering Smith continued his suggestions. “And by the way, Bob, I want you to pass this word for me up and down Front Street. Sinclair has his friends in town and it’s all right–I know them and expect them to stay by him. I expect Murray’s friends to do what they can for him. I’ve got my friends and expect them to stay by me. But there is one thing that I will not stand for on any man’s part, and that is hiding Sinclair anywhere in Medicine Bend. You keep him out of Medicine Bend, Bob; will you do it? And remember, I will never let up on the man who hides him in town while this fight is on. There are good reasons for drawing the line on that point, and there I draw it hard and fast. Now Bob and Gene Johnson were at Oroville when you left, were they, Bob?” He was fastening his rifle in the scabbard. “Which is deputy sheriff this year, Bob or Gene? Gene–very good.” He swung into the saddle.

“Have you got everything?” murmured Scott.

“I think so. Stop! I’m riding away without my salt-bag. That would be a pretty piece of business, wouldn’t it? Take the key, Bob. It’s hanging between the rifles and the clock. Here’s the wardrobe key, too.”

There was some further talk when Scott came back with the salt, chiefly about horses and directions as to telephoning. Whispering Smith took up a notch again in his belt, pulled down his hat, and bent over the neck of his horse to lay his hand a moment in McCloud’s. It was one o’clock. Across the foothills the moon was rising, and Whispering Smith straightening up in the saddle wheeled his horse and trotted swiftly up the street into the silent north.

CHAPTER XXXIX

AMONG THE COYOTES

Oroville once marked farthest north for the Peace River gold camps, but with mining long ago abandoned it now marks farthest south for a rustler’s camp, being a favorite resort for the people of the Williams Cache country. Oroville boasts that it has never surrendered and that it has never been cleaned out. It has moved, and been moved, up stream and down, and from bank to bank; it has been burned out and blown away and lived on wheels: but it has never suffered the loss of its identity. Oroville is said to have given to its river the name of Peace River–either wholly in irony or because in Oroville there was for many years no peace save in the river. However, that day, too, is past, and Peace County has its sheriff and a few people who are not habitually “wanted.”

Whispering Smith, well dusted with alkali, rode up to the Johnson ranch, eight miles southwest of Oroville, in the afternoon of the day after he left Medicine Bend. The ranch lies in a valley watered by the Rainbow, and makes a pretty little oasis of green in a limitless waste of sagebrush. Gene and Bob Johnson were cutting alfalfa when Whispering Smith rode into the field, and, stopping the mowers, the three men talked while the seven horses nibbled the clover.

“I may need a little help, Gene, to get him out of town,” remarked Smith, after he had told his story; “that is, if there are too many Cache men there for me.”

Bob Johnson was stripping a stalk of alfalfa in his fingers. “Them fellows are pretty sore.”

“That comes of half doing a job, Bob. I was in too much of a hurry with the round-up. They haven’t had dose enough yet,” returned Whispering Smith. “If you and Gene will join me sometime when I have a week to spare, we will go in there, clean up the gang and burn the hair off the roots of the chapparal–what? I’ve hinted to Rebstock he could get ready for something like that.”

“Tell us about that fight, Gordon.”

“I will if you will give me something to eat and have this horse taken care of. Then, Bob, I want you to ride into Oroville and reconnoitre. This is mail day and I understand some of the boys are buying postage stamps to put on my coffin.”

They went to the house, where Whispering Smith talked as he ate. Bob took a horse and rode away, and Gene, with his guest, went back to the alfalfa, where Smith took Bob’s place on the mower. When they saw Bob riding up the valley, Whispering Smith, bringing in the machine, mounted his horse.

“Your man is there all right,” said Bob, as he approached. “He and John Rebstock were in the Blackbird saloon. Seagrue isn’t there, but Barney Rebstock and a lot of others are. I talked a few minutes with John and Murray. Sinclair didn’t say much; only that the railroad gang was trying to run him out of the country, and he wanted to meet a few of them before he went. I just imagined he held up a little before me; maybe not. There’s a dozen Williams Cache men in town.”

“But those fellows are not really dangerous, Bob, though they may be troublesome,” observed Smith reflectively.

“Well, what’s your plan?” blurted Gene Johnson.

“I haven’t any, Gene,” returned Smith, with perfect simplicity. “My only plan is to ride into town and serve my papers, if I can. I’ve got a deputyship–and that I’m going to do right away. If you, Bob, or both of you, will happen in about thirty minutes later you’ll get the news and perhaps see the fun. Much obliged for your feed, Gene; come down to Medicine Bend any time and I’ll fill you up. I want you both for the elk hunt next fall, remember that. Bucks is coming, and is going to bring Brown and Henson and perhaps Atterbury and Gibbs and some New Yorkers; and McCloud’s brother, the preacher, is coming out and they are all right–all of them.”

The only street in Oroville faces the river, and the buildings string for two or three blocks along modest bluffs. Not a soul was anywhere in sight when Whispering Smith rode into town, save that across the street from where he dismounted and tied his horse three men stood in front of the Blackbird.

They watched the new arrival with languid interest. Smith walked stiffly over toward the saloon to size up the men before he should enter it. The middle man of the group, with a thin red face and very blue eyes, was chewing tobacco in an unpromising way. Before Smith was half-way across the street he saw the hands of the three men falling to their hips. Taking care, however, only to keep the men between him and the saloon door, Smith walked directly toward them. “Boys, have you happened to see Gene or Bob Johnson to-day, any of you?” He threw back the brim of his Stetson as he spoke.

“Hold your hand right there–right where it is,” said the blue-eyed man sharply.

Whispering Smith smiled, but held his hand rather awkwardly upon his hat-brim.

“No,” continued the spokesman, “we ain’t none of us happened to see Bob or Gene Johnson to-day; but we happen to seen Whispering Smith, and we’ll blow your face off if you move it an inch.”

Smith laughed. “I never quarrel with a man that’s got the drop on me, boys. Now, this is sudden but unexpected. Do I know any of you?” He looked from one face to another before him, with a wide reach in his field of vision for the three hands that were fast on three pistol-butts. “Hold on! I’ve met you somewhere,” he said with easy confidence to the blue-eyed man with the weather-split lip. “Williams Cache, wasn’t it? All right, we’re placed. Now what have you got in for me?”

“I’ve got forty head of steers in for you,” answered the man in the middle, with a splitting oath. “You stole forty head of my steers in that round-up, and I’m going to fill you so full of lead you’ll never run off no more stock for nobody. Don’t look over there to your horse or your rifle. Hold your hands right where they are.”

“Certainly, certainly!”

“When I pull, I shoot!”

“I don’t always do it, but it is business, I acknowledge. When a man pulls he ought to shoot–very often it’s the only chance he ever gets to shoot. Well, it isn’t every man gets the drop on me that easy, but you boys have got it,” continued Whispering Smith in frank admiration. “Only I want to say you’re after the wrong man. That round-up was all Rebstock’s fault, and Rebstock is bound to make good all loss and damage.”

“You’ll make good my share of it right now and here,” said the man with the wash-blue eyes.

“Why, of course,” assented Whispering Smith, “if I must, I must. I suppose I may light a cigarette, boys, before you turn loose the fireworks?”

“Light it quick!”

Laughing at the humor of the situation, Whispering Smith, his eyes beaming with good-nature, put the finger and thumb of his right hand into his waistcoat pocket, drew out a package of cigarette paper, and, bantering his captors innocently the while, tore out a sheet and put the packet back. Folding the paper in his two hands, he declared he believed his tobacco was in his saddle-pocket, and asked leave to step across the street to get it. The trick was too transparent, and leave was refused with scorn and some hard words. Whispering Smith begged the men in front of him in turn for tobacco. They cursed him and shook their heads.

For an instant he looked troubled. Still appealing to them with his eyes, he tapped lightly the lower outside pockets of his coat with his fingers, shifting the cigarette paper from hand to hand as he hunted. The outside pockets seemed empty. But as he tapped the inside breast pocket on the left side of the coat–the three men, lynx-eyed, watching–his face brightened. “Stop!” said he, his voice sinking to a relieved whisper as his hand rested lightly on the treasure. “There’s the tobacco. I suppose one of you will give me a match?”

All that the three before him could ever afterward recollect–and for several years afterward they cudgelled their brains pretty thoroughly about that moment–was that Whispering Smith took hold of the left lapel of his coat to take the tobacco out of the breast pocket. An excuse to take that lapel in his left hand was, in fact, all that Whispering Smith needed to put not alone the three men before him but all Oroville at his mercy. The play of his right hand in crossing the corduroy waistcoat to pull his revolver from its scabbard and throw it into their faces was all too quick for better eyes than theirs. They saw only the muzzle of the heavy Colt’s playing like a snake’s tongue under their surprised noses, with the good-natured smile still behind it. “Or will one of you roll a cigarette?” asked Whispering Smith, without a break between the two questions. “I don’t smoke. Now don’t make faces; go right ahead. Do anything you want to with your hands. I wouldn’t ask a man to keep his hands or feet still on a hot day like this,” he insisted, the revolver playing all the time. “You won’t draw? You won’t fight? Pshaw! Then disengage your hands gently from your guns. You fellows really ought not to attempt to pull a gun in Oroville, and I will tell you why–there’s a reason for it.” He looked confidential as he put his head forward to whisper among the crestfallen faces. “At this altitude it is too fast work. I know you now,” he went on as they continued to wilt. “You are Fatty Filber,” he said to the thin chap. “Don’t work your mouth like that at me; don’t do it. You seem surprised. Really, have you the asthma? Get over it, because you are wanted in Pound County for horse-stealing. Why, hang it, Fatty, you’re good for ten years, and of course, since you have reminded me of it, I’ll see that you get it. And you, Baxter,” said he to the man on the right, “I know I spoke to you once when I was inspector about altering brands; that’s five years, you know. You,” he added, scrutinizing the third man to scare him to death–“I think you were at Tower W. No? No matter; you two boys may go, anyway. Fatty, you stay; we’ll put some state cow on your ribs. By the way, are you a detective, Fatty? Aren’t you? See here! I can get you into an association. For ten dollars, they give you a German-silver star, and teach the Japanese method of pulling, by correspondence. Or you might get an electric battery to handle your gun with. You can get pocket dynamos from the mail-order houses. Sure! Read the big book!”